Relief tents, Haiti, and temporary shelter

Crisiscamp London co-founder Vinay Gupta discusses his “hexayurt” project — as seen in the Worldchanging book — in light of the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, and how relief tents are a “bandaid on a gunshot wound”:

Relief tents are a lie: they last for a year. By the time the tent has rotted and the people are homeless again, the eyes of the media have moved on to some other disaster, and everybody says the situation is fine. “Transitional sheltering” is supposed to take over from the tents, but it’s always, always, always too little too late. Nobody can afford a thousand bucks a family anyway. Not for all of them. NGOs, being fairly small compared to the size of the problem, generally count the successes rather than the failures anyway.

HEXAYURT COUNTRY

(Thanks, Mark!)